A few months ago, one of our customers asked why we use rennet that contains the preservative sodium benzoate. The answer, as we posted then, was that we couldn’t find rennet that didn’t have it. Our cheese contains so little of the preservative that you would have to eat 3,000 pounds of it to ingest [...]
Posts Tagged ‘industrial food’
Seed Catalogs: Welcome to the Monoculture
‘Tis the season for seed catalogs, and for dreaming of the coming spring garden! Yet I can’t help but notice a similarity between the various catalogs I get. Last week I received three, two from companies in Illinois and one from Minnesota. A quick survey revealed: All three sell Item #B7739, Oriental Lily Mix, priced [...]
Half a Billion Eggs Recalled
The CNN headline says, “Feed likely source of salmonella in eggs, federal officials say.” This as the egg recall expands to 550 million eggs from two mega-egg-producers in Iowa, with tainted eggs traced to 23 states and almost 1,500 cases of salmonella poisoning. Kind of makes you wonder what those mega-farmers feed their chickens. Sustainable [...]
Sustainable Saints, or Loam-Loving Luddites?
This post by Kerry Trueman was originally posted on The Green Fork. Have you heard the truth about just how bad the good food movement really is? The boosters of biotech want you to know that our global food crisis will only be worsened by the sustainable ag advocates who oppose technological breakthroughs, the [...]
Canada’s Egg Police: Industry vs. Small Farmers
In Canada, a small farmer with 99 or fewer hens can sell “ungraded” eggs at his/her gate, but nowhere else. So a small farmer who sells eggs at the farmers market is breaking the law. With prices for farmstead eggs skyrocketing, industrial egg producers are fighting back against what they see as an infringement [...]
The Cheese Handbook
(Joi image.) “Scientific investigation… has made industrial cheese making more efficient, which is a less pleasant thought, for the inevitable concomitant of idustrial efficiency has been a standard of meditocrity…” –The Cheese Handbook (Bruce H. Axler), available on Google Books.
Considering meat
Americans eat an average of 222 pounds of meat each year. Though we only rank 17th in world per capita consumption (Denmark ranks #1, followed by the Czech Republic and Spain), that’s still a lot of meat– roughly 73 billion pounds per year, the equivalent of 146 million heifers or 18 billion chickens. We eat more [...]
Dairying in 1784
Dairying has a long and distinguished history. The passage above comes from J. Twaley, Dairying Exemplified, or The Business of Cheesemaking (London, 1784) p. 18, courtesy of Google Books. Note the assumption that daries were run by women. Historically, milking cows and the associated dairy production was considered “women’s work,” inappropriate for men. Thus well into [...]
There Can Be Only One
(Wal-Mart photo.) Time Magazine reports that Wal-Mart has a plan: to put as many of its remaining competitors out of business as it can. And financial writer Jeff Hwang at Motley Fool notes that Wal-Mart already exerts an emormous amount of leverage over its suppliers: “Wal-Mart accounts for 28% of Dial’s sales, 24% of Del Monte Foods’ [...]
